Safe Grill Cleaning

Background Traditional wire grill brushes pose a health danger to consumers.

Historically, low-cost wire brushes have been marketed to clean BBQ grill grates before cooking. Most often this is done on a hot grill.  They are made of short sections of stainless steel or brass wire bundled together and force fit into a brush head made from wood or plastic. Over time, as the brush is used repeatedly, the bristles work themselves loose. Small wires can be hard to see on the grill surface, but easily attach to food being cooking. There have been many accounts of people needing ER visits to remove grill brush wires from throats or stomach linings. With the grill surface needing cleaning before each use there was a need for a better solution.

Solution Number 1: Cleaning Without Bristles, and Number 2: Using Safer Bristle Materials.

Solution Number 1 uses a wooden paddle type tool to scrape the grill grates clean, trademarked as Safe Scrape. This solution works well because the wood edge is durable enough to remove burnt food residue, yet able to wear with use on grill grates to make a custom fit.  The product works on grills hot or cold, but heat improves use and doesn’t damage the wood construction. The scraping action is easy and familiar. Further innovation is a contoured scraping edge to allow for better visual cues and faster conforming to grill grates.

Solution Number 2 does not try to change behavior. The brush concept for grill cleaning is already well established. Palmyra, a plant fiber commonly used in brooms, as well as a high-heat nylon infused with a mineral abrasive match performance in effective cleaning and withstanding heat, but are not harmful if ingested.

Market Results Reducing risk and providing better solutions to the simple task of grill cleaning opened up what once was a very low-cost market into a segment that can hold higher retails and multiple SKUs. Retailers were in part motivated to change because of liability associated with traditional wire brushes but also to add margin dollars for a previously low profit product segment. 

Line Extensions The market shift described above opened a “safe grill cleaning” segment that demanded multiple safe SKUs at various price points. What once was only an opening price point cleaning item now has “good, better, best” offerings, with varying sizes and features, like replaceable brush heads and combinations of scraper and brush features. 

The key takeaway from a product development standpoint is the value of thinking past initial solutions to growing the product into a self-supporting category.